They have long wished for a cigarette-free America, but shied away from calling for smoking rates to fall to zero or near zero by any particular year. The power of tobacco companies and popularity of their products made such a goal seem like a pipe dream.

But a confluence of changes has recently prompted public health leaders to start throwing around phrases like “endgame” and “tobacco-free generation.” Now, they talk about the slowly-declining adult smoking rate dropping to 10 percent in the next decade and to 5 percent or lower by 2050.

Acting U.S. Surgeon General Boris Lushniak last month released a 980-page report on smoking that pushed for stepped-up tobacco-control measures. His news conference was an unusually animated showing of anti-smoking bravado, with Lushniak nearly yelling, repeatedly, “Enough is enough!”

“I can’t accept that we’re just allowing these numbers to trickle down,” he said, in a recent interview with the AP. “We believe we have the public health tools to get us to the zero level.”

And yet the left is intent on making marijuana legal everywhere. I've written before about the hypocrisy of the left banning smoking in one's own home in some counties in California -- but exempting marijuana.

If tobacco completely disappeared in this country I would not shed a tear. Ditto for marijuana. What upsets me is the hypocrisy of the left, intent on banning cigarettes, but insistent on legalizing marijuana, when both involve substantial health risks. It is not freedom that they desire; they are just in control of what gets banned now.